‘By the time she was eleven, the house was deep in age-old quiet. She had tender breasts already and, my God, what looked like hips, said the Shapiro aunts, turning her this way and that in the kitchen. Her mother and the aunts kept her well surrounded: no dark fact could break into this picture, dirty up or confuse it. But it was 1936 and her father’s store was in trouble, and something else was wrong. His eyesight was failing, and he got up to pee five times a night. Nobody spoke of it. The aunts swarmed in her mother’s parlour, clutching Clara to their bosoms, giving her big smacking kisses. “Doll,” they called her, and “Cutie-pie”, words that didn’t suit her then, that never would. She felt, at the time shunned by life, as it didn’t think her worth the effort, and was deliberately keeping away.’

She was not so familiar with the outside world and all she knew was a world inside the house doing household chores and reading books. Then came a chance for her to get to know the outside world when her father had suddenly got blurring of his eyesight. Clara was to work in the shop as her father’s vision was not well. She finally got the opportunity to break free from clutches of her aunts and mother and enjoy the life outside the house. She started going out with her father for buying stocks for the shop and saw many places on journey. She started living an adventurous life compared to her mundane household livelihood.